Twitter announces Instagram rival

We've previously written about the photo-wars that were about to kick off, and it seems they're going off much sooner than anticipated. As Instagram slowly backs away from anything that Mark Zuckerberg doesn't own, Twitter have now launched their own photo filtering service.

Over the weekend, Twitter stopped embedding IG photos completely. In a blog, Twitter have announced that their own in-house filters will be provided by Aviary.

"Starting today, you’ll be able to edit and refine your photos, right from Twitter," it said. "The latest versions of Twitter for iPhone and Twitter for Android introduce a few new ways to enhance the images you tweet." Of course, they're offering the usual retro filters. One of them is called 'cool' and another, 'gritty'.

Interestingly, Facebook is going to merge personal data from Instagram accounts. A membership vote on the changes ended on Monday with a whopping 88% of ballots opposed (600,000 ballots no less) to the move.

However, Facebook rules mean that they can go ahead with the merger as fewer than 30 per cent of members participated in the ballot.

Either way, we're all going to be seeing a lot more cats shot through lomo filters.